This year's Super Bowl commercials featured rambunctious geriatrics, cross-dressing husbands and Jamaicans from Minnesota. But brand mascots, once a staple of the advertising world, were almost completely absent.

At $3.8 million for 30 seconds, a bad Super Bowl commercial can be an expensive marketing mistake. Boston.com's Brand Bowl rated them all for both buzz and sentiment. So which ads were the biggest losers? Read on ...

SodaStream's proposed Super Bowl ad was rejected for 'denigrating' competitors Coke and Pepsi. But its brash advertising isn't the only controversial thing about the Israeli-based maker of soft drink machines.

Chevy's Super Bowl ad poking fun at Ford's pickups has turned into an all-out brawl in Detroit. Has Ford just lost its sense of humor, or is there more at stake here than meets the eye? Actually, there's a lot more -- and some of it's excellent news.

Between 2002 and 2011, companies spent a whopping $2.5 billion on Super Bowl advertising; this year, a 30-second commercial cost an average of $3.5 million. But what do you get for all that cash. In the case of these eight major advertisers, not as much as they'd hoped.

Hershey has been disturbingly lax in addressing abusive child labor practices in the Africa's cocoa industry, and recently, over 100,000 consumers let the company know they're not pleased. Now the chocolatier is changing its ways -- just in time.

Call it the "second-screen" Super Bowl. About two-thirds of smartphone and tablet owners use their gadgets to do things like text or post on Twitter while watching TV, according to research firm Nielsen. So, for Sunday's game, companies from Coke to Chevy are trying to reach fans on all the "second screens" they have.

Showbiz veteran Betty White has been cresting quite the popularity wave lately. After work on TV shows like The Golden Girls, hilarious Super Bowl ads and a guest-hosting stint on Saturday Night Live, she has landed a two-book deal with Penguin.

It was controversial for CBS to accept an anti-abortion ad from group Focus on the Family. But long before the game started, Focus had already accomplished its goal of communicating a pro-life message through the vehicle of affable college-football star Tim Tebow and his mother.

Audi's "Green Police" ad campaign, featuring green-uniformed cops who give energy-saving tips, will have its big launch with a commercial during the Super Bowl. But in a historic faux pas, the German car maker has picked a name with some unpleasant Nazi-era connotations.

What type of content will get an commercial banned from the Super Bowl? As domain name registrar Go Daddy discovered, one answer apparently involves mixing an effeminate ex-football player and lingerie.

For the past week, CBS has been under fire for accepting an ad, starring college football star Tim Tebow, from the Christian-conservative group Focus on the Family opposing abortion. Now a gay dating site is taking advantage of the dust-up, asking: If them, why not us?